


seeing red

by Turacoverdin



Category: Re:ゼロから始める異世界生活 | Re:Zero Starting Life in Another World (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Oboreru, Suicide, Wrath IF (Re:Zero)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29408562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turacoverdin/pseuds/Turacoverdin
Summary: An alternate ending to Wrath IF.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	seeing red

He trips and he falls and he lays there for a moment, wounds stinging and muscles aching, before he reaches out his hand. It meets nothing. The ground stops here.

He stands.

His eyes are closed. He’s fallen down a lot. He’s scraped and bruised and bleeding. Damaged.

He’s pathetic. He’s been stumbling around like a blind little white lamb, tripping and falling, acting like this’ll make a difference. It won’t. Nothing he does will make a difference. It shouldn’t. He hates it. He’d hate it even more if it did. He wants to kill someone. He wants to take a knife and slice it through their throat and let the blood run through his fingers. He wants to take a knife and drag it down his chest until he can grasp his skin and peel it open and reach inside himself and grab that gnawing creature, the one that’s always biting at his diagram and clawing at his chest, and he wants to strangle it until it’s dead. He wants to strangle himself. He wants Ram to strangle him.

She didn’t. She could and she fucking didn’t. Her fingers had pressed down and she’d snarled and his vision had fuzzed black and grey and he’d liked it because this way he could pretend everything was supposed to be monochromatic. But she couldn’t kill him, and she pushed him away, and she’d taken back that relief, yanked it away from him, and all he could see was her bright red and the sharp, sharp grey. She’d fallen to the ground beside him and sobbed and he’d wanted to sob, too, so he did, and he’d wanted to kill her, too, so he did.

She’d still been in color, even lying there, dead. That’s so fucking unfair. Maybe it’s all random, savage chance, and he’s been giving the colors meaning that they don’t have. Maybe it’s all a flip of a coin and he’s just been flipping tails the whole time.

She’d spared him and she’d still been in color and he’d known why that was. It wasn’t an act of kindness, her inability to kill him. It wasn’t an act of mercy. It was an act of cruelty, plain and simple. She couldn’t do it. He was all she had left. Without him, she was nothing. Worse than nothing. She was a broken tool dedicated to slaying a dead monster. She was too fucking weak.

He’d laid there and he gasped for air and he’d hated her, viciously, in a way he hadn’t since everything started. He’d stood and he’d left. It wasn’t too hard to get away. The mansion was burning down around him, but the fire only hurt if he let it. And he did let it hurt, and so it didn’t, not really. The monsters were busy tearing each other to shreds, so they missed the greatest monster of all. Fucking idiots. Pieces in an abandoned game, all of them. They think they’re seeing in good and evil, black and white, but he’s the one who’s vision is in monochrome, and everything is so grey and he hates it.

He’s hungry. He’d been riding that ground dragon for—He doesn’t know how long. He’d passed through a wasteland formed by the clash of giants. Isn’t that funny? They killed everything but what they wanted to.

He’s hungry, because there’s something gnawing at his gut, and since there’s no creature it must be hunger. There’s never any creature. There’s only him.

That’s not right. He’s the creature. He wants to bite off someone’s limbs, rip them apart with his own mouth, feel strands of muscle caught between his teeth, let their blood dye his face red. He wants to leave them to bleed out, slowly, right in front of his eyes. He wants them to die broken. He wants to die.

He doesn’t want to open his eyes. It’ll be grey, here, just like everything else, or even worse, it won’t be.

He opens his eyes, and it’s not grey.

The sky is blue—cerulean blue, maybe, or azure blue, or phthalo blue, or aegean blue. He knows the names of all the colors but he's long forgotten their hues.

The grass is green—mint green, olive green, jade green, viridian green.

The rocks, far down below him, are sharp, sharp grey.

He wants to reach up to the sky and drag his nails across it until it bleeds red. He hates it. He hates it, he hates it, he hates it.

He should have done this long ago. So, so long ago. He’s used to it, now, killing himself. It’s no great loss. He should have done it at the start, but he didn’t, because he wanted Ram to hurt and he didn’t want himself to hurt.

He got what he wanted. He always gets what he wants. He wants to die, now, and he wants to stay dead.

He pulls out his coin. He stares at it in his hand.

His hand is grey. Sickly, dead, sharp grey against the blinding colors behind it. He doesn’t know how long it’s been this way.

The coin is silver. It’s grey. It’s one or the other and he doesn’t know which one it is so he likes it, as much as he can like a useless piece of metal. He’s got two of them, three of them, four of them—he tosses away one coin as soon as he flips it and he moves on to the next. He never keeps them.

He flips it.

Heads.

He flips it again.

Heads.

He wants to laugh. He laughs. He wants to cry. He holds the grey coin tight in his grey hand and he steps forwards towards the grey rocks. He falls.

It hurts and he laughs and the coin falls free and onto the sharp grey rocks and it’s gold, shiny-bright gold. It’s facing down. Tails.

He laughs again, bitter and jagged and sharp. He coughs, and copper drips out on his tongue. It colors the rocks red—not cherry red, not garnet red, not crimson or scarlet. Blood red. Sanguine, Natsuki Subaru reaches out with one sickly-grey red-stained hand and then dies.

**Author's Note:**

> the title's so good that i feel bad using it on such a short fic
> 
> thanks to suffaru for helping me with this! comments and feedback welcome and appreciated!


End file.
